1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to systems management. More particularly, embodiments of the invention relate to the use of a cascaded approach to characterize the status of high-order elements of a complex system.
2. Discussion
The operational status of managed resources in an information technology (IT) system has historically been projected onto the abstract business-level functions in various ways. Usually, this projection might involve some form of status propagation, in which various schemes can be employed to aggregate the status of the IT resources. Perhaps the simplest status propagation approach may be to assign higher-level resources the worst status of its constituents. Although simple to understand and requiring little to no maintenance and configuration, this approach can have a “false positive” impact in which things appear much worse than they really are. False positives may be especially problematic in service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems, which typically have large-scale redundancy. In such a case, an outage of a single deployed SOA service may not represent a problem at all. Worst-status propagation, however, could wrongly indicate that the service is entirely unavailable.
At the other extreme, some status models might require the systems administrator to design, implement, and maintain customized status management rules, which could in turn require complex programming knowledge. Although this approach may have the greatest potential for accurately propagating status, it can come with the considerable—and even prohibitive—expense of being complicated to codify and tedious to maintain as the business function evolves.
Given these two extremes, there may be other solutions to simplify status propagation, but a number of challenges still remain. For example, the concept of “percentage-based thresholding” could be used to allow administrators to essentially define tolerance levels in terms of percentages. For example, an administrator might say that a business process is degraded if more than 50% of its constituent resources are degraded. This approach, however, may have much of the tedium associated with rules-based approach while sometimes resulting in vague or even misleading results. Indeed, false positives could be just as common with such an approach. Simply put, the difficulty with all of these potential approaches is that the premise on which they are based may be flawed—although the operational status of a particular resource may be important, simply propagating its operational state onto business functions that use that resource could conflate operational state at the IT resource level with the functional state at the business level.